I saw Spike Lee’s Bamboozled for the first time last week at the BAMcinématek. It was a typical "Spike Lee Joint,” filled with humor and satire. The film centers Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a pretentious, self-loathing, Harvard University-educated black man works for CNS, a television network. The boss of Delacroix at the network is Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), an insensitive, irritating, crude white man. Dunwitty considers himself “down” with black people and proclaims to have a better understanding of black culture than Delacroix. When Delacroix presents Dunwitty with a television script that captures black individuals in an uplifting, positive, nurturing, light, he's slapped with rejection. To be fired Delacroix creates a modern day minstrel show where black stars adorn in blackface. Surprisingly to Delacroix, the show becomes a hit, and there begins his mental bankruptcy.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to watch this film at my age now. I wouldn’t have appreciated nor understood the importance of Bamboozled when it first premiered back in the year 2000 (I was only 10-years-old). It's almost impossible to watch this film unscathed. Fifteen years after this film's debut blacks still face the same challenges, in a fraught contemporary climate where the mediation of the black image in American society is at a crucial juncture, Bamboozled’s trenchant commentary on the importance, complexity and lasting effects of media representation could hardly feel more urgent.

I crave ‘90s television. I find myself always reverting to old sitcoms like 227, Living Single, A Different World, Family Matters because they fill a void. Black people, especially women need better media representation. Reality TV shows flooded television. If I could write a billet-doux to one show, it would be, Being Mary Jane. Lee is right we need more diversity.

“I say, and I say it again, you've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok.”

-Malcolm X